Thursday

Today was a pretty normal day at the clinic. I got to watch Rogers, the lab technician, test children’s blood for malaria. It was similar to the gram staining process in microbiology. He showed me a slide with malaria and a slide of blood without malaria. Very cool. Also our burn kid came back today to have is burn redressed. And another girl from school came in with a burn on her leg from a motorcycle. Other than that it has been a fairly uneventful day. We also worked on inputting patient record into their computer system. Every other patient has malaria. No joke. As I said, it is fairly easy to treat if you have access to treatment. We also saw a lot of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, anyone who complains of abdominal pain or back aches probably has it. It’s just a whole different world. Everyone is prescribed ibuprofen, even if they have no diagnosable illness. Healthcare in Uganda is such a rare thing, it’s not something everyone is responsible for themselves. If you feel the least bit sick, go to the clinic to get drugs. FIMRC has many outreach programs and patient education programs to work on changing this. Their goal is to teach them to value the doctor’s advice, not just medications.

I experienced my first African thunder storm today. This one wasn’t that big they say. It’s just rain and thunder, no wind, but the rain comes down in sheets for a solid 20-30 minutes. The thunder claps are loud and long, they seem as if they are right on top of you. Probably because they are.

Tonight after work was great. A few of us took a soccer ball and walked through the woods to this random field where a bunch of kids were hanging around. And cows, they just tie a rope to their foot and then stake a stick into the ground. Ugandan soccer is nuts. There were six Mzungus and 6 Ugandan kids. We tried to organize them into teams, but then more children just kept joining us. Out of 30 kids none of them spoke English. Finally some referees came, they knew how to play soccer and spoke English. And carried machetes. (Think- out of bounds= lose an arm; red card= off with your feet…) It was so crazy. We had picked up our goal keeper when we were walking to the field; he was very, very drunk. But a really good goal keeper, so funny. Every time the ball came to him he fell all over it, sacrificing his body in a very dramatic way, but usually keeping the ball out of the goal. The Ugandan kids were good. The Mzungus, not so good. Since it had rained today it was also pretty muddy, which added to our gracefulness. By the end we were exhausted from running and laughing. But overall it was a great day.